Ian Terway - Marking Period One

Artist’s Statement

Recently I have noticed a big change in the style of art that I create. I have been moving further and further away from illustration and moving into music. I have been playing the guitar since sometime sophomore year and it's practically possessed me. On my off time I spend hours upon hours practicing, learning new songs, tunings, chords, and techniques. I am intrigued by how the instrument works, and how different voicings and types of chords can invoke different feelings in the listener. I prefer using acoustic guitar when learning or performing music because it feels more personal to me, and I feel like I can put more soul into my work acoustically then if it was being distorted through speakers.

Bottle Cap Poster

When starting this quarter Miss Hull introduced us to the artist Aurora Robson. Aurora specializes in creating artwork out of plastic bottle caps and bottles. When she started creating these works they were made to reflect upon nightmares she used to have as a child. She connects these nightmares to the collective nightmare of the overuse of plastic that affects us all and is destroying the environment. We created posters to inform the school of a bottle cap drive; in this way we could keep some bottle caps out of our oceans and landfills and provide material for Aurora to use.

Project

For our assignment we had to create a piece of art that revolved around the theme of recycling.  At first I had no idea how I could connect both music and recycling together, but then it came to me; last year for a physics project I built a three stringed guitar out of a cigar box, a piece of wood, and some odds and ends. Even though the guitar didn’t work very well as a conventional guitar, it worked perfectly as a slide guitar. My father also fairly recently discovered a beautiful guitar thrown away in the trash with some very fixable problems. After some cheap repairs he gave the guitar to me. So there I had two instruments that both had a relation to recycling, so all I needed was a song to record.

My choice song was “Loser” by Beck. There was no real rationale behind this choice besides it has a prominent slide guitar riff in it.

I recorded the song in three different parts, the slide guitar, the lead, and the sitar (which I arranged for guitar), and then pieced them together using GarageBand. I was going to record the bass in the song also, but my bass amp died on me during the recording process. Once I have the amp fixed I would like to go back and complete the song, and maybe add some drums with a drum machine.

MP3 and GarageBand File

Instruments

Home Made Cigar Box Guitar

Trash Find